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In contrast to accounts that see Chinese investment in Africa as part of a grand strategy deployed by the Chinese state or as one element in an emerging Beijing Consensus counterposed to the prevailing Washington Consensus, then, on-the-ground surveys of such projects tend to reveal precisely the opposite: most Chinese firms in Africa are operating on a purely pragmatic level and have been drawn to the continent not by any state-directed incentives but instead by conventional economic imperatives.

As political scientists Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri argue, even core geopolitical projects such as control over the South China Sea or relations with North Korea are “largely reactive” and tend to be the outcome of multiple, autonomous agents whose actions are only treated as part of a single, unified strategy after the fact. They write that “decades of state transformation, involving the fragmentation, decentralization and internationalization of party-state apparatuses, mean that many Chinese actors, with often differing interests and agendas…now operate internationally with considerable autonomy and limited coordination and oversight.” Thus, the various initiatives, bilateral agreements, and even the odd military interventions that are today portrayed as elements of a coherent and systematic strategy pursued by China’s central government instead encompass “diverse, potentially contradictory activities by a range of actors operating at different scales….”

the mythos of China in Africa, and the general narrative of a New Cold War both serve to obscure that the global imperial order continues to be commanded by ruling class interests headquartered in the traditional administrative centers of capitalist society, which remain safely ensconced in a state machinery founded on US power. Similarly, that power continues to be embodied in a global mesh of US-aligned military infrastructure that includes not only opportunistic alliances with local governments and militias but also hundreds of overseas military bases directly hosting tens of thousands of US soldiers at any given time, alongside planet-scouring naval fleets capable of deploying genocidal scales of violence nearly anywhere in the world at the push of a button. Yet the military dimension of this order is merely a reflection of its deeper economic structure, explicitly visible in the rule of the US dollar as the de facto global currency or in the United States’ control over multilateral financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank. It is implicitly present in the dominant position of US firms within global production, where they are joined by a smaller share of companies from Western Europe and Japan. Meanwhile, at an even larger scale, individual firms, large state institutions, and all other actors within this system are ultimately subordinated to the social imperatives of the system as a whole: the drive to accumulate, the need to preserve property, the necessary use of prices and profit to determine efficiency. The ultimate sovereign of capitalist society is the mute compulsion of capital itself.36 Thus, even the most egregious forms of resource extraction conducted by Chinese firms—which are identical in kind to those of any other company of any other national origin and propelled by exactly the same balance sheet calculus—are ultimately feeding into planetary value chains that more often than not link back to lead firms in the wealthy countries.

Faced with similar conditions after the collapse of the USSR and the defeat of the Japanese in the trade war, dependency theorist Samir Amin once suggested that what we may be seeing is not so much a clear-cut hegemonic transition as the decay of hegemony in the absence of either a successor or a revolutionary socialist alternative, resulting instead in an “empire of chaos” wherein the basic mechanics of the imperial order will be lubricated with continual violence, global trade will slowly fragment into warring regional blocs, and first proxy and then increasingly direct military conflict between these blocs will again become common.

Too real. Overall a great article, thanks for sharing. Nothing entirely new hear for our Hudson-pilled posters but helps outline how American imperial hegemony is still quite strong, and how China (as of yet) is not really concerned with supplanting that any time soon.